When a telephone user receives an incoming call, the user knows little about the caller. Caller ID represents a partial solution, inasmuch as a user can now know the name and/or telephone number of a calling party. For some users this may be sufficient. For other users, e.g., those who receive a large volume of calls and perhaps transact significant business over their telephones, this may not be adequate.
Some incoming calls are more valuable than others. Some calls represent potential business or other urgent communications. Other calls may be important but are less urgent. Still other calls may have little or no value or significance to the user. Some calls in the latter category may even represent nuisances that represent a waste of the user's time and communications bandwidth.
In the drawings, the leftmost digit(s) of a reference number identifies the drawing in which the reference number first appears.